Leveraging Automation for Your Business

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the capability to change the way we work, the way we manage, and the way we conduct research. As automation processes improve, businesses increasingly are looking for ways to leverage the new technology to help with their own goals.

There are certain risks posed by the advancement of artificial intelligence, and the automated applications AI creates are in contrast to the many benefits using automation may bring about. The rewards of automation, when managed properly, are the relief of burdensome activities such as mundane tasks and other minutiae, improved productivity and increased participation.

Consequences of adopting automation for your purposes must be thoroughly thought out to leverage it to the best of your ability.

Automation, once used for only a few specialized tasks, now can be used for data mining, marketing, medical research and building financial models. These are just a few of the applications the technology can be used for, and it’s far from a comprehensive list. The details of automation are specific to the industry that employs it, the organization that manages it and the managers who oversee its implementation.

Why should you consider using automation to help achieve your business goals? Quite simply because utilizing it properly could result in a more efficient, more effective workforce and could even create job opportunities. By freeing up mental resources and enhancing the capabilities of your workforce, your organization will be able to operate at its peak efficiency and efficacy.

“Machines can attend to vastly more information and more complex processes than human beings, and try out more drugs or vaccines than we can in the lab,” Pedro Domingos, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington told National Geographic. “Machine learning is used to discover drugs by simulating the process on a computer, which takes a fraction of the time and cost.”

After you begin analyzing where your organization needs help, you can start the process of using automation that makes sense for you. Your business may need help with routine marketing tasks, creating models for the data metrics you bring in. Or, perhaps you need help organizing large amounts of information related to research and development of a product you’re about to roll out. Whatever the application, there are automated applications made to benefit your business.

“Faced with a constant onslaught of data, we needed a new type of system that learns and adapts, and we now have that with AI,” Arvind Krishna, head of research at IBM, said in a recent blog post. “What was deemed impossible a few years ago is not only becoming possible, it’s very quickly becoming necessary and expected.”

With automation, you can achieve things you may not have thought possible before. As Krishna makes clear in the quote above, the capabilities of leveraging automation are untested and virtually limitless.

To truly leverage automation, you’ll need to manage the results of its implementation and have your team perform synthesize and arrive at conclusions through critical thinking and social cooperation—skills yet unmastered by even the most powerful artificial intelligence. Pairing automation with skilled social thinking will result in a highly productive and effective organization. This can result in some ancillary benefits such as increased cooperativeness between team members.

For companies interested in rapid growth, automation can help propel your processes. From manufacturing to marketing, automation can help boost your efforts in research, analysis and production. Automating repetitive tasks can help free up workers allowing them to work on more complex and pressing problems within the company. In addition, workers learn new skills through the adoption of automation and managers can more effectively understand how to manage complexity within your organization.

However you decide to use automation, it’s important to do a thorough and objective analysis of your organization. Where can you improve? Where do you need help? How can we empower workers to better perform? How do we measure performance? These are key questions that can help guide your analysis of your organization and well as your adoption of domain-specific automation applications.

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